Negative SEO has been a hot topic for the last few years. After Google implemented Penguin update, negative SEO through link spam has gained momentum. Websites get bombarded with tons of low quality links that trigger search engine penalty causing a loss in rankings.
Recovering a website from such a penalty is time consuming. Google recommends disavowing such links. However, the process of reviewing all the links, disavowing low quality links and then waiting for Google to remove the penalty takes months.
Another fact remains that such attacks are not one-off, competitors or spammers will try to penalize the website for a long time by regularly generating tons of low quality links. Another alarming trend seen is that search marketers use negative SEO to gain clients.
Loss incurred by business owners due to such tactics is huge. Especially if they rely only on Google for business.
Creating a website with great user experience and adding quality content regularly does not offer any defense from link spam. Google recommends focusing on creating a user-friendly website and adding high quality content on the website, but all this will turn futile if websites remain vulnerable to link spam.
Google has in the past ignored certain factors that it found were being abused. One well known factor is the Meta Keywords tag. Now Google could have penalized websites abusing Meta Keywords tag but it started ignoring them. Same could be done with link spam. One important factor that makes this case stronger is that links are not in the control of the website owners. If I am not in control of something then why should I be penalized for it?
Google can penalize a website if the owner implements something on the website that is against Google’s guidelines. But can it penalize a website for something that the owner is not in control or aware of?
Why should I be held responsible for something I have not done?
People can argue that website owners themselves can be involved in generating links to artificially improve rankings. It then becomes even more important for Google to ignore spam links. If Google passes link juice only from the links that comply with its guidelines and completely ignores links that do not comply then people will automatically stop using such linking techniques as it will neither harm a website nor influence its rankings. SEOs stopped optimizing Meta Keywords tag because Google started ignoring it.
Google in many cases has allowed the monster to grow instead of killing it in its bud. The best example is “Content”. Prior to Google’s Panda Update, SEOs focused on creating content for search engines which provided no value to users. Remember content spinning? It is only when the quality of Google’s search results started to take a hit in a major way that it decided to act on content spam.
It will be in the interest of everyone – Google, users and business owners if negative SEO through link spam is killed before it becomes a greater menace.